In the context of Cloud Nine, this means that Clive’s masculinity is integral to his British nationality and his white English race. This occurs in much the same way as gendered identity depends on the distinction between the male and female sexual body. Whereas according to Gates, race refers to the identity which is discursively produced through the body’s genealogy and/or biological features, such as skin colour and facial characteristics. In breaking down the binary categories of identity, these playwrights may be viewed as anticipating the transition from feminism to post-feminism. This occurs in much the same way as masculinity exerts power over femininity. However, according to Said, nation refers to the set of relations whereby one discursively produced historical and geographical entity exerts power over another. It must be noted from the outset that concepts of race and nation are closely interwoven in these plays. The purpose of this chapter is to examine intersections of gendered, racial and national identity in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and David Hwang’s M. Foucault posits a world of discourse which is “a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies.” (quoted in Wolfreys 67) One such strategy, as identified by Said, is that of self which is defined in opposition to Other. In this context, gender, race and nation are socially constructed, or discursively produced, not in mutual exclusion but in mutual constitution. ![]() Of course, the difference between de Beauvoir and Butler is that the latter benefits from the work done by Michel Foucault on discourse “as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable” (quoted in Wolfreys 67). and Edward Said have also claimed are socially constructed. Moreover, this must, by definition, intersect with other identity categories such as race and nation, which theorists such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. However, she concedes that this is the case insofar as one enacts a gendered identity on the surface of the body through a stylized repetition of acts. Butler disputes the notion that one “is” or “becomes” a woman by arguing that sex, as well as gender, is culturally constructed. “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” Simone de Beauvoir famously declared in The Second Sex (1949), leading Judith Butler to surmise in the opening pages of Gender Trouble (1990): “If one ‘is’ a woman, that is surely not all one is” (6). ![]() Thus, when fluid sexuality – in the form of female sexuality and homosexuality – is used in these plays to undermine gender binaries, constructions of race and nation also start to come undone by implication. For both Churchill and Hwang, categories of gender, race and nation can be mutually deconstructed in the same way that they are mutually constructed because their foundation in discourse is fundamentally unstable. It argues that both plays are successfully anti-essentialist by examining the discursive relationship between categories of gendered, racial and national identity. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang are ultimately essentialist or anti-essentialist, accentuating or disavowing difference. This article contributes to the debate as to whether Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill and M.
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